THE FIRST SUSAN SONTAG CERTIFICATE–The Weekly Standard’s way of recognizing inanity by intellectuals and artists in the wake of the terrorist attacks–goes, of course, to the essayist and novelist Susan Sontag for her note in the Sept. 24 issue of the New Yorker. She managed, in the space of only 460 words, to score every possible point. There was the shtick of deliberately saying something outrageous: “If the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.” There was the moral equivalence in which the attacked are blamed along with the attackers: “How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?” There was the willful obtuseness in moral reasoning with which she defined “courage” as “a morally neutral virtue.” And finally, there was the use of the occasion to indulge old political grievances: “Everything is not O.K. . . . We have a robotic president.” Sontag set a standard difficult to match. Still, for sheer outrageousness, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen topped her, calling the destruction of the World Trade Center “the greatest work of art imaginable. . . . Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing.” When the uproar in Germany caused the cancellation of a major program of his music, Stockhausen apologized, saying he meant that the terrorists had created a work of “the devil’s art.” It seems hardly fair to include MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the linguistics theorist turned far-left activist, for he fell off the cliff into goofiness more than thirty years ago and hasn’t made any effort to climb back. But he has a fanatical readership among anti-globalization types, and his Sept. 12 statement “On the Bombings” deserves recognition as a definitive statement of moral equivalence–or rather, moral inequivalence, for America is much, much more to blame than its attackers. “The terrorist attacks were major atrocities,” he admits, but “in scale they may not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.” Noting that the attack on the World Trade Center is the first assault against the U.S. mainland since 1812, he points out that in the years between 1812 and 2001, “the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way.” Matching Chomsky is the novelist Arundhati Roy, universally praised author of “The God of Small Things.” In the Manchester Guardian, she declared that Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush are really the same person. The terrorist “is nothing more the American president’s dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of ‘full-spectrum dominance,’ its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think.” When Michiko Kakutani said in the New York Times that Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things” was “Dickensian in its sharp-eyed observation of society and character,” this is probably not what she had in mind. Meanwhile, in the category of moral obtuseness, an honorable mention goes to Judith Rizzo, a deputy chancellor of New York’s school system, who told the Washington Post: “Those people who said we don’t need multiculturalism, that it’s too touchy-feely, . . . I think they’ve learned their lesson. We have to do more to teach habits of tolerance, knowledge, and awareness of other cultures.” But the top place belongs to “The Color Purple”‘s Alice Walker, who wrote in the Village Voice that America should respond not with force but by giving Osama bin Laden a loving lecture on love. “What would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, nonviolent things he has done?” (Are there any “good, nonviolent things” bin Laden has done?) “I firmly believe,” Walker concluded, “the only punishment that works is love.” We had never before heard love described as a punishment, but about this kind of love she may well be right. The final category–the using of the occasion to indulge old political grievances–has innumerable contenders, on both the left and the right. But special mention goes to Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, who wrote, “Now we know why 7,000 people sacrificed their lives–so that we’d all forget how Bush stole a presidential election.” And first place belongs to the filmmaker Michael Moore, most famous for the movie “Roger & Me,” who wrote on his website the day after the attack, “If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, D.C., and the planes’ destination of California–these were places that voted AGAINST Bush! Why kill them?” After the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com publicized the posting, Moore removed it, claiming he had been quoted out of context–only to replace it with a paean to Barbara Lee, the lone member of Congress to vote against giving the president war powers. “Only one brave woman,” Moore explained, “refused to run with the lemmings as they headed off to war.” J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.
